Saint Julie Billiart

Marie-Rose-Julie Billiart was born at Cuvilly, in Picardy, today in the Oise, and was baptized on July 12, 1751, in the church of Saint-Éloi. Her parents, Jean-François Billiart and Marie-Louise-Antoinette Debraine, farmed and kept a small shop. At seven she knew the catechism by heart and taught it to other children, and as a young woman she worked in the fields and at sewing while teaching her companions.

Sources differ on the cause of the illness that struck her in her twenties: a shock in 1774, when a pistol was fired at her father, or poor medical treatment. For some twenty-two years she could not walk, and she went on teaching the children who came to her bed. During the Revolution she refused the priest who had taken the oath and sheltered one who had not. In 1792 she had to flee, hidden under hay in a cart, and reached Compiègne, where Carmelite nuns befriended her and she had to move five times. There she lost her speech for a time and, as she later told it, saw in a vision the daughters she would gather in an institute marked by the cross.

In October 1794 she moved to Amiens at the invitation of the Countess Baudoin, and there she met Françoise Blin de Bourdon, who became her closest companion. On February 2, 1804, Julie, Françoise and Catherine Duchâtel consecrated themselves to God in Amiens, and the Sisters of Notre Dame began, devoted to the education of girls, above all poor girls. On June 1, 1804, the feast of the Sacred Heart, after a novena made at her confessor’s request, she was cured and walked again.

Because the church authorities of Amiens opposed the sisters’ work outside their diocese, the motherhouse moved to Namur, in Belgium, in 1809, and the congregation became the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. Between 1804 and 1816 Julie founded fifteen convents and made 120 trips to visit them. She died at Namur on April 8, 1816, after three months of illness, with the Magnificat on her lips. Her familiar saying was “Oh, qu’il est bon, le bon Dieu,” how good is the good God.

Pope Pius X beatified her on May 13, 1906, and Pope Paul VI canonized her on June 22, 1969. Her remains lie at Namur in a reliquary made at Liège for her beatification, under the altar of a garden chapel of the sisters, and for great celebrations it is carried in procession to the cathedral. At Cuvilly the sisters bought the site of her childhood home, which had burned, and rebuilt the house to its old plan with an oratory. The diocese of Beauvais lists a yearly pilgrimage on a Sunday in May, when her reliquary is carried from her birthplace to the church for a solemn Mass.

In 1840 eight sisters came to Cincinnati at the request of Bishop Purcell. Others sailed to Astoria, Oregon, in 1843, took over the parish school of Saint Mary’s in Boston in 1849 and reached San José, California, by 1851. The sisters founded Trinity College in Washington, D.C., in 1897, one of the first Catholic colleges for women in the country, and Emmanuel College in Boston in 1919, and their College of Notre Dame in Belmont, California, became Notre Dame de Namur University in 2001. Today over 1,000 sisters serve in sixteen countries on five continents.

The reliquary made at Liège for her beatification shows on its front the young Julie teaching the catechism at Cuvilly. At Namur the Heritage Centre of the sisters, in the motherhouse restored after the bombing of the Second World War, presents the history of the congregation.

• Cuvilly, her birthplaceThe house rebuilt by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur on the site of her childhood home, with an oratory for prayer.
• Cuvilly, church of Saint-ÉloiThe church where she was baptized and made her First Communion, and where the May pilgrimage ends with Mass.
• CompiègneThe town where she hid during the Revolution and, as she told it, received the vision of her future congregation.
• AmiensThe city where she met Françoise Blin de Bourdon, began the Sisters of Notre Dame on February 2, 1804, and was cured on June 1, 1804.

On our ways: Amiens, Compiègne.